2020 10 02 — Weeknotes
2.37 — the week I stop being a professional softball coach (apparently)
Not as crazy a week as last week but continues to be a lot on, which is a good thing as means lots of things being progressed.
Some of the highlights this week.
We had a Digital Design Authority meeting this week, where we went through the usual update on progress on projects, refreshing to see that good progress being made in most (but not all of them). A few things that I will need to progress to unlock and focus a couple of these that I will do over the next couple of weeks. It was a different meeting this time as we didn’t have a major business case to approve for a system / business area, but we had two items on Digital Inclusion and Digital Connectivity. Both integral parts of the Digital Strategy and indeed for the council, but good to see something different come to the group.
Franco talked us through the work being pulled together to enable a better and more digitally inclusive borough, working with partners on the skills, equipment and connectivity with partners across the Borough. A really important piece of work bringing lots of threads together from across the Council.
Nick then updated us, with Michael Snaith, who we have helping, on the work that he has been doing on connectivity in the borough, this again is a really important. BT have recently announce Hounslow as one of their next areas of the Fibre First Programme — https://www.openreach.com/news/openreach-adds-another-67-locations-to-its--future-proof-broadband-build-plan/. This together with the work we are doing locally in enabling our residents to have faster and more effective connections is excellent news for our communities.
A lot of time this week spent on the Leisure mobilisation programme, we are bringing our Leisure services back in house and we have a month to do this. As you can imagine this is taking up a lot of people’s time at the moment as we focus on what we need to do to deliver this. I think October is going to fly past as quickly as September!
We had a debrief session on the Socitm conference that was last week. Was really good to see the feedback and the numbers attending, there was some great feedback on how the sessions were run and the speakers so all in a resounding success!
Given everything going on at the moment with the pandemic and staff working at home for extended periods of time. This week we took our Future World of Work programme to board for discussion and agreement. The aim is to set out the long term vision of how the council will work in the future, building upon our values and setting the vision for how we are going to work. Some immediate things that we need to do, to engage and communicate with colleagues; to start to get ideas and volunteers but we are seeing this as a real opportunity to do something different and link to the #1Hounslow ways of working. Also love the fact we have started to abbreviate it to Future WOW!
Also happening this week. Apparently this was the week I retired from being a Softball assistant in the US after 20 seasons, it was lovely to get numerous tweets congratulating me and thanking me for everything I have done. Well that was until the correct Mark Lumley was tagged in and stole my thunder :-)
Tune of the week: Steps — What The Future Holds (Official Video) — Feels right this week linking to the Future World of Work and who doesn’t love steps….
